Three Thing Game Three is Coming

Keep your diaries free for the weekend of 17th 18th March folks. You know why….

Lightroom Rocks

Last week I sold a MacBook and bought a camera. And got a free copy of Adobe Lightroom. And it is wonderful. Up until now I’ve been muddling through managing my many photographs, keeping them in folders and using Windows explorer to find and look after them. This mostly works, but it is a bit of a pain.

Lightroom provides a really good way to find and then fix your pictures. It works really well with raw files and the noise reduction abilities are awesome. It also has some rather cool picture styles built in. And it will upload directly to Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug, among other places. It also takes care of the importing and has very good tagging and metadata management.

If you are serious about your photography, then I think you should take a good look at it. The trial download runs for 30 days or so, by which time you should be hooked.

Bought a Red Robot USB Hub

These are really neat usb-hubs from Red5. I got the red one. Now I feel a need to own one of each….

Nokia Blue Case

I think my Lumia 800 is turning me into a fashion victim. I got the Nokia blue case today. Looks pretty good too, as you can see. Special prize for naming the person in the back of the picture. I love the way that the case doesn’t look like a case, it just looks like I have a cool, blue phone. Which I have.

If you want to be cool too, Amazon have them in stock in a range of colours, look for the magic stock number Nokia CC-1031.

Escape Characters in XNA fonts

I’m making a sister application for the PlayMusic application. The PlayMusic program doesn’t do much, it just starts playing a random playlist when you run it. Not a lot of functionality, but it does mean you can start music playing by issuing a spoken command. I’ve had nearly a thousand downloads up to now, so a few people must find it useful.

The PlayMeMore application will do something similar. When you run it the program will find the album that the currently playing song is part of, and then play that album. I want this because frequently on random play I hear a track that I’ve not heard for a while, and fancy hearing the album it came from. I thought it would be nice to be able to say “Start PlayMeMore” and have it do this for you.

I’ve written the program in XNA because I like XNA and I might add a visualisation or two later. The program displays the name of the album when it starts it. By a wonderful quick of fate the first album it tried to play was Bête Noire by Bryan Ferry (darned good album too). And the program crashed. Any idea why? Took me a few minutes to work it out. It has to do with SpriteFonts.

When you use a font in XNA it builds a raster with the character designs on it. The font requirements are given in an little XML file that specifies the TrueType font to be used for the character designs. This font also specifies which character codes are rendered. And the default character codes don’t include the character ê. The fix is simple enough, open the file and make the end value a bit bigger.

    <CharacterRegions>
      <CharacterRegion>
        <Start>&#32;</Start>
        <End>&#255;</End>
      </CharacterRegion>
    </CharacterRegions>

Normally the end value is 126, but this does not include accented characters like ê. Making the value 255 seems to fix the problem. And I’ve put a try-catch around my DrawString calls in case I hit any music info that has any weird characters in it. Like the artist formally known as Prince….